Haiku 1
April 1, 2021
It’s early and bright
April arrives like an egg
We’re insatiable
#lizsharespoems #nationalpoetrymonth #30daysofhaiku
Haiku 1, April 1, 2021
Poetry Project — March 2021
A couple of years ago, we tried dizains — ten-line poems of ten syllables each line.
Our theme then was square, orderly, 10×10 — at least on the surface. Here’s mine.
Now we’re trying them again and our theme is dizzying — an alliterative take-off on dizain.
From square to dizzying in two short years? (I mean, yes, right?)
But interestingly, both of mine are about change. And birthdays. And being on the cusp of something wild. That’s how spring makes me feel, and dizains, too, I guess.
Twelve: On the Precipice
Liz Garton Scanlon
The engine downshifts, ears pop, shoulder falls
away: my twelfth year is this mountain pass,
pushing up toward tree line through rockslide walls.
It’s dizzying (thin air, inertial mass)
and yet, just right – my childhood surpassed.
Here at the top, the altitude is true
the pressure drops, there’s nothing I must do
but navigate curves and elevation.
No time to pump the brakes, take in the view –
I’m headlong downhill for the duration.
For more dizains, visit:
Tricia
Tanita
Laura
Kelly
Sara
Andi
And if you’d like to try our challenge next month, we’ll be writing in the style of Linda Hogan’s poem “Innocence.” Share your poem on April 30th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We look forward to reading them!
Now, off to Poetry Friday with you! Enjoy!
Poetry Project — February, 2021
Well, this was a gamble.
Our challenge this month was a roll of the dice — metaphor dice!
Our pal Laura rolled for us — we had several options to choose from — and I went with “my body is a bootleg blessing.” It has a nice alliterative ring to it but … what about the poem? In the end, the pandemic-insurrection-freak storm informed me. When I say I don’t understand anything anymore, I mean it! But even in the face of everything, the body is such a concrete and even weirdly logical thing. At least that’s how I’m feeling about it today…
Bootlegger: A Metaphor Dice Poem
By Liz Garton Scanlon
And just when I think I don’t understand
anything anymore (not a single thing – not true love
or how to convert ounces to grams or whether to trust
three rickety branches of government) just then, my throat
says I am thirsty, my skin says I am lonely, my lungs say
take it in, take it all in as if it belonged to you.
And I do – swallowing, asking to be touched, inhaling
then exhaling again and again, my body a bootlegged blessing
smuggled over centuries, across oceans and deserts, surviving
ignorance and illness, war and ravishing grief to be alive today,
to do the impossible, to make perfect sense of things.
You can read the others here:
Sara
Laura
Tanita
Tricia
Kelly
And Poetry Friday is at Karen Edmisten’s blog. Enjoy, all. Be safe and well…
Want to try next month’s challenge with us? The prompt: dizzying dizains. (Here’s a little primer for you.) We’ve done dizains once before and apparently liked the process enough to give it another whirl! Join us, and share your poem on March 26 in a post and/or on social media – #PoetryPals.
Poetry Project — January, 2021
It’s a new year (pretty grateful about that) and my Poetry Sisters and I have a new plan.
(Lucky for us it includes Zoom-writing together once a month — yay for poetic companionship!)
As usual, we’ve chosen a prompt-per-month. (We’ll try to remember to share them with you in case you want to write along!) For January, we went to Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler to discover which words were first seen in print the year we were born. Those words were then the fodder for our poems!
I was intrigued by how many of the words for my year were hyphenated or compound so I used LOTS of them. In fact, every word in this poem except the bolded ones were first seen in print in 1967, just like me! It’s very different from the kind of poem I’d usually write but who cares? It was fun.
Born In 1967
The Original
Flower Child
Self Professed
Honey Bell
Born Of
Low Tech
Slow Pitch
Yada Yada
Steps Into
Full Bore
First World
Ego Trip
Makes It Through
Whacked Out
Crack Back
Hissy Fit
PAUSE
Re Format
Still Here
Mono Hull
Micro Quake
She Crab
That’s Me
Now, please go enjoy the others, here:
Tricia
Laura
Tanita
Kelly
Sara
Andi
And go check out Poetry Friday with Jan at Bookseed Studio.
OH!! And if you want to write along with us next month, here’s the plan: Roll a set of metaphor dice and write a poem inspired by your metaphor. If you don’t have the dice, try the online version here. Then, post your poem on Feb 26 (and share on Twitter as #PoetryPals).
Stay safe and well — Liz
Poetry Project — December, 2020
It’s the last Friday of the month… and of the year.
It’s Christmas.
Winter solstice has passed but the days are still awfully dark.
Sometime last December, my poetry sisters and I made up our calendar for the year.
It’s hard to even fathom anymore what we expected.
We based quite a few prompts on vision — the clarity 2020 would surely bring.
We looked back in order to course correct or add perspective.
We looked forward (it was a new decade after all!) with… was it eagerness? inspiration?
It makes me feel tender for the 2019 versions of us, and when I say us I mean all of us.
For this final poem, December 2020, we thought we ought to write about wistfulness, which you have to admit is rather on the nose. Also, ironic since for mental health’s sake, many of us have tried not to dwell on the peace and reconciliation that hasn’t been struck, the human touch that hasn’t happened, the health that hasn’t been secured. And yet, here we are at the very end of a very dark, nearly impossible year, wistful.
What did we know, when we gave ourselves that prompt?
Maybe it’s that no matter the year, the pandemic, the election, the gaping societal chasms, it is hard not to ache a little as a year turns. To wish we’d been able to see or accomplish or understand a little more. To fix, finally, what ails us individually, familially, as a people. It is hard not to want to wrest a few months or minutes of the goodness back, too. To wish we didn’t have to let go of what we’ve loved. Maybe that’s always true and this year just throws it into stark relief.
From that place in me to that place in everyone, I send out empathy and love. And this tanka, about the other night’s planetary conjunction, when Saturn and Jupiter came closer to each other than they have been in nearly 400 years.
Wistful
On such a long night
all the people crane their necks
looking for the light,
a planetary promise
that we’re closer than we think
My pal’s poems are here:
Tanita
Sara
Kelly
Laura
Tricia
And Poetry Friday is at Live Your Poem.
Happy New Year, all. Stay safe and well.
Poetry Project — November, 2020
The challenge: Hindsight, looking back at an earlier poem with, um, 2020 vision
The focal point: Terza rimas about gratitude from, yes, 2016
Whew. OK. I figured it might be time for a terza rima on gratitude, reprised.
Here goes…
Thanksgiving, 2020
In these four years our hearts have all been skewed –
we’re jumpy now, on guard, and sick with doubt.
This is a different kind of gratitude,
the thinnest thread of hope for the devout
atop a baseline of insistent truth.
There’s so much work to do, day in, day out.
It’s not enough, to fill the voting booths,
it’s not enough to pour into the streets.
We heed the urgent gospel cry of youth
(they’ve had it, folks, and they have got receipts).
It’s time to build the stuff that’s right and just,
to make what’s broken finally complete.
Each stone we add, a sign of stable trust.
We’ll find our way to thankfulness – we must.
Visit my pals at:
Sara
Tanita
Laura
Tricia
Kelly
Andi
And Poetry Friday’s at Carol’s Corner.
Be safe and well, everyone.
Poetry Project — October, 2020
The Naani is a poetic form from India consisting of 4 short lines — no more than 20 to 25 syllables total — and very few other rules. (Which always sounds freeing, but isn’t.) We added a twist, because we’re fun that way, focusing on foresight, or fall, or both.
Foresight. These days. Ha! My response was to look to the natural world because nothing about the human world seems predictable at all anymore. There are messages for us in eggs and trees and maps, though, and we can read those…
An egg uncracked,
a mystery unsolved,
what waits for us tomorrow –
one sun or two?
Inside the tree
sits a clock, ticking off days,
seasons, shades of yellow,
predicting what comes next.
Topographic lines
read like fingerprints:
Go this way. This will be steep.
This will be beautiful.
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Enjoy these other poems, friends, and stay safe and well…
Laura
Sara
Tanita
Tricia
Kelly
Andi
Poetry Friday is at Teacher Dance this week!
OH! And would you like to join us next month? Our theme is hindsight and the goal is to pick one of your old poems to revise and/or write a new poem in conversation with it… Try it!
Poetry Project — September 2020
My poetry pals and I try to plan our prompts at the beginning of the year so when the end of each month rolls around, the inspiration is just sitting there waiting for us. Sometimes it’s a surprise — as if a rascally little muse-elf slipped into our Google doc in the dead of night just to mess with us. But in a good way. Not the way 2020 is messing with us. You know what I mean.
Anyway, that’s how it was for me when I looked at this month’s assignment:
Ponderous, or based on an image of a hippo; written in any form.
Um, what????
But ok, rascally little muse-elf. Here goes….
Stones in the River
Liz Garton Scanlon
When she was seven
and everyone had
make-believe friends
and make believe families
and make believe long hair,
my sister had hippos,
two make-believe hippos,
which is something like
make-believing elephants
right into the middle of the room
but less trunk- and tail-y,
less obvious, more
misunderstood.
The hippos (my sister’s)
were named Sugar
and Flour, ingredients
for the sweetness
you try to conjure up
when you’re seven
and don’t really understand
what’s going on around you,
when you are like a stone
in the river yourself,
not sure if the water
is making room for you
or trying to push you around.
Sometimes I wonder
if Sugar and Flour
were as territorial
as their earthly dopplegangers,
if they carved out a spot
in my sister’s heart,
if they float there still,
gray and graceful,
until their ponderous hunger
takes over and out they come
into the waiting night,
chuffing, roaring, wanting
what all of us want.
Go read the others now:
Tanita’s
Laura’s
Sara’s
Tricia’s
And Jone is hosting Poetry Friday this week!
***AND, BY THE WAY, if any of you want to join us in our efforts next month, we’ll be writing a naani poem, and theme is foresight or autumn or both. Good luck!***
Stay safe and well, friends.
Poetry is power.
Poetry Project — July, 2020
Hello, friends. This month, our assignment was to write an etheree on the theme of foresight or summer or both. Did you write along with us? If so, share on social media with the #poetrypals hashtag!
Meanwhile, for those of you new to this form, it’s a ten-line poem with each line being one syllable longer than the last. It was invented by Etheree Taylor Armstrong in the middle of the last century and if I had a name that pretty, I’d want an eponymous form, too.
I LOVE etherees. I don’t know what it is about them — the building block simplicity, the shape on the page, the increasingly weighty and meaningful lines — but I find them rather addictive. That said, I wrote just one this month as I’m feeling, in general, a need for less. (And isn’t it sort of weird and eerie that we decided to keep coming back to the idea of foresight this year — this particular year when looking ahead becomes sometimes overwhelming, sometimes almost meaningless?)
Annnnyway….
Here goes…
Each
open
calendar
square, ravenous
and lying in wait –
gaping, hungry, quiet –
a long dark alley of days.
Don’t be afraid, I say aloud
(my words echoing like a kicked can).
Waiting at the other end is just space.
For more etherees, visit:
Laura Purdie Salas
Tanita Davis
Tricia Stohr-Hunt
And Poetry Friday is at Reading To The Core!
Poetry Project — June, 2020
Well, here we are. Another month.
Looking to poetry as refuge and escape again.
Glad you’re here…
This month’s theme is susurrus, or an image of thick woods, in whatever form we wish!
What I wish is that I’d been able to actually use the word susurrus —
what a beauty! — but I hope I conjured it up.
A Little Red Re-Telling
Liz Garton Scanlon
Red hood
Eyes bright
Deep woods
Near night
Basket laden
Lonely walk
Quiet cabin
Knock knock
Bed ridden
Nana dear
Winds rush
Stir fear
Brave girl
(Axe-strong)
Raises voice
So long!
All’s well
Wolf flees
Moon settles
In trees
See the other poems here:
Sara
Tanita
Tricia
Laura
Kelly
Andi
Rebecca
And here:
POETRY FRIDAY
And if you’d like to write with us for next month, the assignment is an etheree; theme is foresight again (or summer, or both); post for the July 31 Poetry Friday edition!